The present invention relates generally to the field of personal computing, and in particular to a method and apparatus for propagating user preferences across multiple computer environments. The invention has particular usefulness for users who routinely access a number of different computers, often at different physical locations, for work and/or personal purposes. The present invention can relieve such users from having to separately establish preferences at each such computer relating to, for example, keyboard and display settings, word processing software settings, Internet browser "bookmarks," and the like.
In today's increasingly computer-dependent society, it is becoming more and more common for people to have or use multiple computers. In a work environment, for example, a person may use a desktop personal computer (PC) in his or her office, another desktop or laptop PC in a development lab, and yet another laptop PC for use when traveling. In addition, this same person may have a desktop PC at home which he or she uses for both work-related and recreational activities. A common problem faced by these multi-computer users is that user-controllable system and software preferences are generally not configured in the same way across these various computers because of a variety of system and software complexities. This problem can cause untold frustration for users forced to continually reenter or change configurations to maintain some semblance of uniformity across multiple computer environments.